lines of flight

A few notes on how I’m feeling about my blog, Twitter and (what I think is about to be) my embrace of Flickr.

This post looks briefly at two plugins that integrate WordPress and Twitter. I spend a lot of time with each, and this kind of integration makes sense in theory, but I have not yet seen it work incredibly well in practice.

Both Twitter Tools and TweetSuite have options to enable widgets for displaying tweets (including favorited tweets in TweetSuite) and also give the option to auto-tweet when you publish a post.

The developer-described “experimental” digest features of Twitter Tools were the main draw for me to test this WordPress plugin by Alex King. I wanted to see what happens when you extract a specimen of Twitter text and consider it out of context. At the very least, I could have an archive of my tweets.

However, missing for me in the Twitter Tools digest is the option to collect this daily or weekly digest as an Unpublished draft, which would allow me to comment, edit and tag before it goes live, or even chose to keep it private (on account of being extra boring or annoying).

Apparently this plugin isn’t being actively developed anymore, which does not bode well for its usefulness in the future.

The other Twitter-based plugin I’ve tested recently is Dan Zarella’s TweetSuite. TweetSuite generates trackback-like “tweetbacks” that post automatically when anyone twitters a link to a blog page. The list of tweets at the end of the article on Zarella’s page is probably the best(?) example the tweetback display in full force.

To see it on my site, I sent a tweet about my own post, and at the end of that post, voilà! you see the tweet that the twitterverse saw. (You can go ahead and ignore the lame fact that that post has one comment and one tweetback and both are from me :~p what I learned on that post helped me produce a page that got over 3,300 views in one day!)

Neither Twitter Tools nor TweetSuite does it all for me yet, nor are they right for the Mālamalama magazine site. Both my sites may be too non-techie for it to ever take hold, but who knows, even Mālamalama is on Twitter now, so maybe one day…?!

Double rainbow at dawn on New Year’s Day in Honolulu, 2009.

Can you take a bad picture of a rainbow? I wanted to share this, but I could not for the life of me figure out which of these photos is best.

there are rainbows

12 Photos

So I’m adding them all but justifying the lack of editorial eye by using this as a chance to play with the NextGEN photo gallery plugin (again).

This time it needs to be a sidebar with a thumbnail that launches the whole photo gallery, from alongside a larger story. This is a functionality that has been requested at Mālamalama, just testing it here.

By the way if anyone else is just getting started with NextGEN Gallery plugin, there are some helpful instructions available from this guy.

UPDATE January 12, 2009

Doing this all kinds of wrong, ugh. Using the compact view album instead of a link to a gallery that has it’s own page(!!). Makes a lot more sense… I think? Only thing is, I can’t have words wrap around this because if I put it in a narrow div then the gallery and slideshow try to open within it.

Now to figure out why the captions don’t show in the slideshow…

A few photos from my recent trip to Northern California.

Not that spectacular, I know. I mainly uploaded them to play with the WordPress NextGEN photogallery plugin. I installed this plugin looking for a fast, easy way to get slideshows online, specifically for Mālamalama magazine, which is now built out in WordPress(!!).

However, I find myself really liking the gallery (thumbnail) navigation. The slideshow gives more control to the creator for things like picture order and audio–we like control at the magazine–but the gallery lets users select the pics they particularly like and breeze through the rest, or not.

The other option for this type of photo presentation would be to make a video with the still shots, but that takes a bit more labor and creates issues of how to insert the caption info. But, video can be hosted on a site like youtube, which reaches a wider audience and can be easily embedded by others.

decisions, decisions…

Summer is over. Time for the dusty Bluebird theme to fly away, not least because Twitter incorporated it into their design ages ago (I had it first), but things are just different now. New season, new nephew, new deadlines.

Time for something more subdued. This loamy, static look is called MNML and so far it suits my mood perfectly.

The MNML theme is conceptually related to Twitter in that it lends itself to micro-blogging, which I’m liking lately. Perhaps a bit too much. Something about posting these really tiny snippets of myself feels like a freer form of expression. At least, it’s more portable (phone-friendly) and easier than blogging, that’s for sure. Freer? eh. Whatever. LoL.

I will try not to go all “dear diary” with the content, but I don’t apologize for being inconsistent in my posting style. My published clips are still listed here as for the rest, we’ll see.

Thanks again to WordPress for making this possible.

I’ve decided to expose my <body> on the internet in honor of Naked Day ’08 on April 9th. Thousands of other people are doing it, too, so I figured, why the heck not. You heard right: I’m stripping off my styles and going bare on the internet… that is, my website will be going bare on the internet, for all to see. What were YOU thinking? ;~p

My purpose in participating in Naked Day ’08 is three-fold:

• Advocate web standards This is the official reason for Naked Day and a cause that I am fully down with but am much too lazy to explain here, mainly cuz I do it all the time at work! That’s what a good link is for anyway, right?
• Celebrate good design Trying to pick matching link colors and backgrounds and fonts for a site is not fun for me as a non-designer, and the results always underwhelming. The industry has come a long way, baby, and now hundreds of beautiful, free templates are available for WordPress alone. The design I currently use is called Bluebird and it’s by Randa Clay. Many thanks, design people!
• Show off WordPress The code for the WordPress software that powers the blog is clean and standards compliant, meaning that even when you strip away the pretty work designers do, the site still makes sense.

WordPress makes participating in Naked Day ’08 super easy by providing a plugin that will automatically turn off my CSS template. The result should be a text-based, bare-bones-looking site. Not pretty but very usable…. at least I hope that’s what happens LoL… it’ll be a good experiment.

On the jeelago.net index page, which is not powered by WordPress, I manually strip-teased out the very minimal amount of CSS I’ve used to do things like align the text and set the width. Were my site more complicated and I more adept in php, I could use a script to strip, but that won’t be necessary this year.

The much anticipated WordPress 2.5 upgrade has been installed and is working away to power this blog. There shouldn’t be any changes on the front end, but let me know if anything looks off. My cynical friend among many, took the time to highlight some of the improvements.

One of the things I had hoped to do after the upgrade was install the Popularity Contest plugin which would generate a list of the most trafficked posts. Unfortunately for me, that plugin is not working correctly with the new version yet. So I’m just going to guess.

From monitoring my stats and eyeballing the numbers, rankings and search terms that bring people here, these are what I think are the most popular posts from my first eight months of blogging:

1. Lapp it up: Pamela Anderson’s Finnish heritage
2. the pop secret is out–microwave popcorn is super easy to make
3. watch the Boondocks
4. in search of the perfect travel backpack
5. reservations about Anthony Bourdain in Hawaii
6. supreme master moomin vision and the muumibuumi
7. the overwhelming cuteness of twin baby Bengali tigers born different colors
8. Barack Obama- Yes We Can